Site updates and dev notes — last entry: May 25, 2026. Track ongoing work, fixes, and content restructuring across the site.

Explore active development tasks, site maintenance updates, and planned improvements, followed by completed tasks below.

Custom admin tools for exploring site structure, taxonomy behavior, and a visual archive of published media attachments.

An overview of setting up, securing, and maintaining a self-hosted VPS as the foundation of the site.

Covers key Linux setup tasks, from system updates to service management, forming the backbone of server operations.

Explains how DNS, SSL, and CDNs like Cloudflare optimize site speed, security, and worldwide accessibility.

How WordPress evolved from a casual setup into a structured, scalable content management system.

Custom WordPress code and tweaks hosted on GitHub. Click to view my open-source customizations and plugins.

How I configured my site’s security layers, including firewalls, plugin choices, and practical hardening steps to protect against common attacks.

Covers the tools, techniques, and strategies I use to improve my site’s speed, response time, and overall performance, both on the front end and server side.

Outlines my approach to organizing, optimizing, and integrating images across the site—balancing performance, quality, and long-term maintainability.

A dynamic framework connecting people, ideas, and media through structured tags, custom fields, and semantic relationships across the entire site.

A concise overview of backup approaches, tools, and recovery planning to protect your site from data loss and downtime.

Covers how contact forms and email systems are configured to ensure reliable communication and secure message delivery.

Covers the tools and workflows used to manage, develop, and maintain the site, including Obsidian, VS Code, Git and WP-CLI.

A journey into the heart of code and data—breaking systems down to their roots to master your craft from within.

A visual tour of raw data—how hex reveals the hidden structure behind files, randomness, text, images, and code.

What does your computer really see when it runs a program? Let’s peel back the layers of a simple XOR tool.

A single operator that can encrypt data, reverse strings, and even recover missing values? Welcome to the strange power of XOR.

Using Wireshark, we visualize how data travels through your machine and the network — revealing encapsulation in vivid, byte-level detail.

Most web traffic today is encrypted — but what does that really mean, and what does it protect you from?

GPG reveals the real distinction between cleartext, encoding, and encryption — a perfect entry into the world of modern cryptography.

Even if your web traffic is encrypted, your DNS queries may still leak what sites you visit. Here’s what that looks like—and how to stop it.

How passwords are stored, how hashes work, and why modern systems rely on salts to slow down attackers.

Raw tools like curl, telnet, and netcat let you explore, debug, and defy standards—revealing how systems actually behave.

Snort, ClamAV, and YARA reveal a shared logic between antivirus and network intrusion detection—pattern matching as control, insight, and defense.

I wanted to write an article on open source software, and specifically Linux. Sometimes I forget how deeply I understand these systems—and that many people…

My sites are currently using Wordpress on Apache. It is more efficient on a low-end VPS to use NGINX.

A custom shortcode-powered footnotes system that connects chapters to referenced CPTs like books, concepts, and quotes with anchors.

ChatGPT has empowered me to create a site with more advanced features than I imagined possible. I have a lot of work ahead of me…

A single memory instruction can make GPT-4-turbo more efficient—just ask, and it’ll start using fewer tokens.

Deleted files linger in free space. dev/urandom makes overwriting them easy. cat /dev/urandom > tmp. No paid tools needed—just raw terminal power.

It is very easy to install Open source/free AI software locally. OpenAIs Whisper lets you convert any audio file to text locally. This allows you to keep your files private without having to upload them to a web-based transcriber.

I used Adminer to safely and efficiently replace featured image extensions with .webp in the database, avoiding manual updates while preserving file paths and post associations.

Using dd in Rescue Mode, I cloned my VPS’s disk for a full WordPress backup, ensuring bare-metal recovery.

A breakdown of how my homepage grid reflects the full content lifecycle — from tasks to chapters — using dynamic WordPress structures.

Free 10GB Koofr storage makes encrypted chapter backups easy with rclone. Sync folders, save logs, and automate with aliases.

Learn how to turn styled WordPress cover blocks into crisp images using Safari’s built-in developer tools on macOS.

I recently added my site to Google search console. This tool give you insights into how Google indexes your site and if it sees any issues.

Simple shell script using WP-CLI to instantly create placeholder tasks as blog posts with default images and excerpts.

The portal system is evolving beyond traditional taxonomy archives into a layered semantic interface designed to help users navigate complex ideas through relationships, symbolic interpretation, inferential mapping, and adaptive knowledge presentation. This upcoming architecture will transform portals into curated cognitive environments capable of combining topics, concepts, themes, entities, and dynamic relationship structures into guided interpretive experiences. The long-term goal is to build an extensible semantic infrastructure where portals function less like category pages and more like navigable maps of interconnected meaning.

Further development is needed to determine how Elements should visually, structurally, and semantically integrate across the broader composition system. Additional real-world Element creation is required before finalizing shared rendering logic, “Featured In” behavior, attachment hierarchy, and compositional relationships with Chapters and Fragments.

Expand the current author-centric relationship architecture into a universal attribution system capable of supporting books, films, television, games, songs, dialogue, quotes, excerpts, lyrics, and collaborative media sources through flexible creator/speaker/source relationships.

Develop a modular multi-view rendering system for portal pages that allows the same semantic dataset to be displayed through multiple presentation modes such as grid, list, stream, timeline, graph, and immersive text layouts. The goal is to separate semantic aggregation from visual presentation so portals become dynamic exploratory interfaces rather than static archive pages.

Restructure the site taxonomy system from a flat classification model into a semantic relationship architecture that supports dynamic portals, automated conceptual relationships, derived metadata, and multiple rendering modes. This project will unify topics, themes, concepts, and portal behavior into a scalable semantic framework designed for discovery, hypertext navigation, and graph-oriented content exploration.

Redesign how Narrative Elements interact with metadata, footnotes, and reverse relationship references inside narrative structures.

Develop a reusable system for embedding Narrative Elements into Chapters and Fragments as live modular content components.

Standardize how Narrative Elements connect to Songs, Lyrics, Fragments, and Chapters while preserving orphan detection and relationship integrity.

Create a centralized WP-CLI maintenance script that handles generic featured image assignment across multiple CPTs using a modular configuration structure and smart update detection.

Develop a long-term semantic tagging workflow that bridges search discovery, taxonomy navigation, and AI-assisted topic assignment across all CPTs. Focus on establishing a sustainable intake + enrichment system for excerpts, lyrics, quotes, and other content types using controlled topic vocabularies and batch tagging workflows.

Introduce a dedicated “People/Entity” taxonomy to decouple content meaning from source types, allowing person pages (e.g., Nikola Tesla, Plato) to aggregate all relevant content regardless of source classification.

Create a dedicated music space for personally meaningful songs, separate from analytical references.

Research and implement a music player capable of supporting curated playlists.

Complete and publish the long-standing rap chapter currently in draft status.

Begin adding and structuring new video game-related content.

Edit and convert movie excerpts into GIF format for integration.

Extract reusable components from chapters into standalone element CPTs.

Review and prioritize the publication of existing draft chapters.

Organize and prioritize external content sources for future integration.

Standardize naming and organization of local content files for easier integration.

Convert scattered book notes into structured, prioritized content lists.

Review CPT relationships and rendering logic for consistency across all content types.

Standardize image display sizes to prevent oversized images in galleries.

Refactor excerpt attribution to support multiple content types beyond books.

Enable quotes and excerpts from non-book media to connect directly to profile CPTs.

Update artist pages to display all lyrics without requiring navigation into individual songs.

Create bidirectional relationships between elements and the content they appear in.

Evaluate whether elements need ACF fields or should remain minimal content-only blocks.

Decide whether elements should be embedded statically or rendered dynamically via shortcode.

Create a future-proof portal layout that cleanly displays all CPTs using consistent visual patterns, standardized block structures, and expandable taxonomy rules.

Replace manual in-text links with automated related content blocks generated from shared taxonomy tags.

The left navigation bar acts funny sometimes. It has a delay where it will be stuck unless i scroll up twice.

Established a long-term taxonomy governance workflow where high-frequency tags evolve into curated portal structures.

Built a lightweight text-only search explorer powered by native WordPress and Relevanssi indexing.

Create a dedicated structure for rap lyrics to improve visibility and organization.

Developed a semantic discovery workflow connecting filtering, search, taxonomy promotion, and portal generation.

Added grouped CPT-aware ID exporting for bulk taxonomy tagging and automation workflows.

Introduce a video game CPT and migrate existing references into structured entries.

Implemented a live client-side content filtering system for instant exploration of all published CPT titles.

Built a dynamic Footnotes Viewer capable of rendering modular shortcode-based references for Chapters and Fragments.

Created a public-facing media library browser for exploring attached published images in bulk.

Rebuilt the public Admin Tools system into a modular template-part architecture using dynamic routing and reusable components.

Rewrite Footnotes & Profile Components with Graceful Failure Handling

Reorganize dev site content architecture to unify CPT usage, improve ordering logic, and reduce manual management for tasks and articles.

Fixed an issue where all fragments displayed on theme and topic pages by making the fragment grid respect taxonomy-specific queries.

Streamlining CPT Archive Redirects and Canonical Structure

Implemented automatic two-way syncing for “related_concepts” ACF field, ensuring Concept relationships stay mirrored both directions without manual updates.

Review content for hardcoded internal links and transition them to tag-based or automated relationships.

Convert high-value topic tags into full concept pages with definitions, imagery, and interlinking capabilities.

Shorten concept definitions and add expandable “Read More” functionality for smoother lexicon browsing.

Create a consistent lyric block structure showing song and artist names for all primary and secondary excerpts.

Rebuild the footnotes layout for consistency, readability, and richer metadata display across all reference types.

Unify visual dimensions and layout styles across all custom post types for a cleaner, more coherent browsing experience.

Plan to revisit full theme migration using LocalWP and UpdraftPlus to test lightweight parent themes and rebuild a modern child structure.

Fixed a flashing nav bar issue that looked like a theme bug but was actually caused by temporary Nginx config changes.

Resolved a tricky bug where Safari and Waterfox loaded truncated CSS by implementing automatic cache-busting with file modification timestamps.

Right now it lists all CPTs, but I want it to also list each individual CPT type together in the same clean list.

Identify unused WP features that can simplify site structure.

Check for unused, duplicate, or redundant CSS ovverides.

Clean up functions.php and organize reusable functions.

Audit theme files for duplicate logic and convert to shared template parts.

Reuse search display structure for taxonomy templates.

Define taxonomy system for themes, profiles, and genres/fields.

Extract grids into reusable partials for songs and chapters.

Exploring scalable ways to excerpt lyrics and quotes without overloading the site with unneeded CPTs or complex structures.

Lexicon entries can now originate outside chapters—raising questions about dangling CPTs, integration balance, and long-term content planning.

Themes are evolving into a flexible tagging system—now requiring multi-chapter support and full cross-CPT search integration.

Planning to separate book subtitles into a new field for cleaner styling and simplified display across templates and archives.

Auto-generate excerpts for lyrics, quotes, and references using ACF plain text fields to improve search previews and Yoast SEO output.

Added security.txt and DNS records to support secure disclosures and email authentication using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols.

I want to add a wikipedia bio to people referenced pages using wikipedia’s API and ACF Pros custom field to store wikipedia slug.

I just noticed that my post and chapter archives are disabled, except for uncategorized posts… Need to fix.

I want to design a parallel data structure to separate content from layout, enabling clean dynamic page rendering across all site sections.

I need to find a way to reduce the width of all cover blocks. They currently stretch beyond the main section.

At the bottom of chapters, it shows all the chapters associated tags. I want to fix this area to be more specifically controlled for use with future ACF Pro field integration.

This taks is very annoying and will take some time, probably months. But it is essential for my task of ACF Pro custom field integration.

I am currently converting all image to WebP format which is much smaller. This involves consolidating every image, one chapter at a time into a folder and renaming them according to my new naming convention.

I created CPTs for Artists, People Referenced, and Books. I also created ta grid page and individual templates for each CPT.

Too many simultaneous tasks are stalling content creation—time to simplify, prioritize, and push through the mess.

Planning a flexible gallery system that enhances Media Library images with ACF fields and taxonomy-driven storytelling capabilities.

Centering movie covers and nav buttons, auto-importing Wikipedia slugs, and linking movies to narrative chapters and related content.

Migrate draft content into CPTs, explore flexible chapter and thread models, and test non-song anchors like books or quotes.

Design quote system to link sources, profiles, and themes—balancing visual style, fair use, and scalability for heavily quoted books.

Outline how lyrics CPT will connect to chapters, artists, and concepts using hybrid layouts and flexible categorization as structure evolves.

Redesign search page to group CPT results using dynamic grids with flexible layouts, accommodating any mix and quantity of content.

Determine best method for embedding styled quote blocks in book pages, affecting layout, storage, and future lyric page design.

Add dynamic chapter references to movie pages using ACF fields, with shared logic for books and support for future content types.

Reimagine the Lexicon as a dynamic concept hub, supporting metadata-rich relationships and future expansion beyond static definitions or tags.

Considering reverse shortcodes or template injection to fix inconsistencies in CPT cover blocks and simplify linked content styling.

Migrating song titles from text fields to CPT links in chapters, with updated templates and improved footnote integration.